TRANSFIGURED NIGHT

Dan Chapman
May 7
5 min read

Arnold Schoenberg and the late chamber music of Brahms

Portrait of Arnold Schoenberg by Egon Schiele (1917)

Verklärte Nacht was inspired by a poem of the same name by Richard Dehmel – a progressive German poet. Schoenberg’s composition tracks the poem’s story. This unusual combination of chamber music with programmatic content was intended by Schoenberg to reconcile the compositional practices of the two great but competing figures in contemporary German musical culture; Brahms and Wagner. In the latter decades of the Nineteenth Century Chamber music in the German-speaking world was a genre dominated by Brahms and Verklärte Nacht has a strong resonance of this with its abstract development of motifs – as well as the harmonic language of Wagner, the great story teller. In 1899 Brahms was still in living memory - dead only two years – and if anything more influential after his death

Brahms’s Late Chamber Music

Brahms’s second cello sonata is one of the most joyful pieces in the repertoire and is quite rightly held as a highpoint in late nineteenth-century chamber music. The string quintet was described by Brahms’s biographer Walter Niemann as, “… the most passionate, the freshest, and the most deeply inspired by nature” of all his works. Originally envisaged as sketches for a fifth symphony the G major quintet is a breath-taking piece, almost orchestral in conception, creating the effect of far more than five instruments!

Schoenberg knew and loved these works – he adopted Brahms’s compositional idea of morphing short motifs into an abstract sound-world. But it also points strongly to the modernist aesthetic which Schoenberg championed against the stagnant, commercialized, popular culture that dominated fin de siècle Vienna, his native city. His discovery of Richard Dehmel’s volume of poetry Weib und Welt (‘Woman and World’) opened his eyes to modernist themes of transformation implying that modernity and innovation were essential to cultural change. The genius of Verklärte Nacht is that Schoenberg blends the influence of both Brahms and Wagner into his own voice as he follows the story of the poem through.

The Piece

Dehmel’s poem is about a woman and man walking through woods at night. The woman tells the man that she is carrying a child conceived with a man that she does not love. The man answers that the warmth between them will transform the baby into their own child. Schoenberg was attracted to the poem by its focus on nature, and its separation of love and sex from bourgeois convention.

In a program note about Verklärte Nacht written near the end of his life, Schoenberg suggested that there were different ways to think about the relationship between Dehmel’s poem and his composition. He said it is perfectly possible to enjoy it as “pure” music, with no knowledge of the poem, or more generally to hear it as being about nature and human feelings. He also provided a series of musical examples and identified which portion of the poem each corresponded to. So the piece falls into two halves, the first concerning the woman’s statement, and the second illustrating the man’s response.

The hushed, still opening depicts the cold moonlight and the walking couple. This section eventually dissolves and, after a pause, a muted cello plays a new theme “with painful expression,” against tremolos in the second violin and viola. This represents the woman’s unhappiness. The following section, which becomes increasingly agitated and declamatory, conveys the woman’s explanation of her situation, and her fears about the man’s reaction. The only respite is a brief, calm passage in the major mode, expressing the consolations of motherhood. After reaching an intense highpoint, this section also subsides into silence.

A few very quiet chords prepare for the second half, which bursts into a clear and unexpected D major. A quartet of violas and cellos, with the first cello playing the melody, provides a warm, rich sonority for the man’s response. This is followed by a magical passage in which muted harmonics and whispering scales depict the beauty of the moonlight. From this a love duet emerges in which the first violin and first cello trade four-note figures. The section continues with a series of lyrical new themes, the most ecstatic of which represents the man’s acceptance of the child. The piece ends very softly with the “bare, cold wood” of the opening transfigured into a “high, bright night.”

So what really occurs in this poem is a celebration of new life, both literally and figuratively. The process by which this happens is through a kind of interpenetration of human warmth from the woman into the man and vice versa. As the man states: “But a special warmth flickers/From you into me, from me into you./It will transfigure the strange man’s child.” The conflict inherent in the story is not so much resolved but, as the title suggests, it is transfigured; the two protagonists are raised in the poem to a higher level of humanity. Towards the end of the poem the man points to a universe created by love:

May the child you conceived Be no burden to your soul; Just see how brightly the universe is gleaming! There’s a glow around everything;

Dehmel’s poem Verklärte Nacht translated by Stanley Appelbaum.

Two people walk through a bare, cold grove;

The moon races along with them, they look into it.

The moon races over tall oaks,

No cloud obscures the light from the sky,

Into which the black points of the boughs reach.

A woman’s voice speaks:

I’m carrying a child, and not yours,

I walk in sin beside you.

I have committed a great offense against myself.

I no longer believed I could be happy

And yet I had a strong yearning

For something to fill my life, for the joys of

Motherhood

And for duty; so I committed an effrontery,

So, shuddering, I allowed my sex

To be embraced by a strange man,

And, on top of that, I blessed myself for it.

Now life has taken its revenge:

Now I have met you, oh, you.

She walks with a clumsy gait,

She looks up; the moon is racing along.

Her dark gaze is drowned in light.

A man’s voice speaks:

May the child you conceived

Be no burden to your soul;

Just see how brightly the universe is gleaming!

There’s a glow around everything;

You are floating with me on a cold ocean,

But a special warmth flickers

From you into me, from me into you.

It will transfigure the strange man’s child.

You will bear the child for me, as if it were mine;

You have brought the glow into me,

You have made me like a child myself.

He grasps her around her ample hips.

Their breath kisses in the breeze.

Two people walk through the lofty, bright night.

Don’t miss the chance to hear Brahms’s late masterpieces and Schoenberg’s rapturous early masterpiece played by six of the finest string players in Europe!!